FAA system doesn't measure up

Saturday

Aug 30, 2008 at 12:01 AMAug 30, 2008 at 9:15 AM

WASHINGTON -- When a computer glitch at a Federal Aviation Administration center caused widespread airline delays this week, it served as a reminder that the U.S. flight system is waiting for a modernizing overhaul. But it also showed that the FAA's management of its existing technologies falls short of standards in other vital sectors.

WASHINGTON -- When a computer glitch at a Federal Aviation Administration center caused widespread airline delays this week, it served as a reminder that the U.S. flight system is waiting for a modernizing overhaul. But it also showed that the FAA's management of its existing technologies falls short of standards in other vital sectors.

By using computing practices that would be considered poor in credit-card networks or power-plant operators, for example, the FAA was vulnerable to a problem caused when new software was loaded at the Atlanta center that distributes flight plans.

Because the FAA relies on just two computing systems, one in Atlanta and one in Salt Lake City, to handle that chore for the entire nation, the software glitch all but sank the system Tuesday. The Salt Lake center was a backup but became overloaded by information coming from airlines. More than 600 flights were delayed from Atlanta all the way to Boston and Chicago.

A failure at the same Atlanta center in June 2007 caused major delays across the East Coast.

Such failures can be prevented with sufficient redundancy, or enough computers and communication channels to handle the same workload in an emergency.

Redundancy is so critical for power and water utilities that they can be fined hundreds of thousands of dollars a day if they're found insufficiently prepared -- and $1 million per day if they're found to be willfully negligent.

"In the industries I work in, if you have something that critical, you generally build more redundancy," said Jason Larsen, a security researcher who spent five years examining electrical plants' control systems. "If this (FAA outage) happened at a power plant, I'd be telling them to open up their checkbook and expect to be fined."

FAA spokeswoman Tammy Jones stressed that these types of problems are infrequent and said that the FAA handles 50,000 to 60,000 fights a day.

"The system is working," she said. "We are making sure people are getting from one place to another."

Basil Barimo, vice president of operations and safety for the Air Transport Association of America, a trade group that represents the nation's largest carriers, said the fundamental problem is that the FAA relies on outdated technology, including a radar-based control system designed in the 1940s and '50s. Barimo is optimistic that the FAA's NextGen modernization program -- a $15 billion-plus upgrade to satellite-based technology that will take nearly 20 years to finish -- will help make more-efficient use of the nation's airspace and safely allow more planes in the sky.

At the Atlanta center, the National Airspace Data Interchange Network computer has been owned and operated by the FAA since the 1980s. After the upgrade, the network will have more memory, work more quickly and be more "fault-tolerant."